Meridian

• Home: http://crampton.me/meridian/
• Documentation: http://crampton.me/meridian/docs/

About Meridian

Meridian is a C++11/14 application framework specifically tailored for server side networked applications. It's meant to be extremely efficient in power usage, memory usage, and low-latency. It's very much a work-in-progress.

Meridian is licensed under the permissive Boost Software License 1.0, an OSI-approved and GPL compatible license.

Authors

Eric Crampton (email: name of this project (at) crampton.me)

Principles

Meridian is unapologetically UNIX. While I'm not anti-Windows, I'm not an expert in multi-threaded, networked, C++ Windows programming (but I've done UNIX network programming since the mid-90s!). Meridian embraces the concept of the UNIX file descriptor, and makes (or will when I've written the code) it easy to use non-socket concepts like pipes, inotify descriptors, and anything else you can represent as a file descriptor all in the same event loop. Meridian works on all free UNIX-like operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD are specifically tested).

Meridian is unapologetically C++11/14. Where it makes sense, newer C++ features such as alias templates, lambdas, move construction, smart pointer types, and library enhancements. Many of these features to the language and library are new. I try to be careful about when and how they're used as we all re-learn C++ best practices. Meridian uses iostreams, RAII, and other familiar C++ concepts.

Meridian tries not to hide too much from you. Meridian treats you like an adult and doesn't paper over some underlying types like socklen_t or in_port_t by typedef'ing them into something else for you. Instead, it exposes them without apology. In some cases, Meridian defines an enumerated type instead of forcing you to use poorly typed ints (e.g., an enumeration for AF_INET, AF_INET6, and AF_UNIX).

Meridian prefers to reuse other open projects. Well, not in all cases, or Meridian wouldn't exist. But, rather that, say, create a new XML library just so it feels right, Meridian assumes you already have a favorite and will use it. Of course, in some cases, Meridian reimplements something which already exists to do it in a new and unique way.

Alternatives

There are lots of alternatives to Meridian which are more currently more fully developed or are trying to solve different tasks. You should probably be using one of these right now unless you want to help build Meridian.

• Poco Project. A cross-platform framework (which works on Windows, too!). It's an entire world you can live in, complete with logging functionality, XML library, regular expression library, etc. Very mature documentation and a friendly API.

• Boost.asio. Unlike Poco, Boost.asio is just about networking and that's it. It's fine, but suffers from the cross-platform lowest common denominator problem/advantage.

• ACE. I used to use this one back in the late-90s. It was starting to feel a little old then, it's ancient now. Refuses to use anything modern in C++, but it is cross-platform and featureful.

Requirements

• A pretty darn modern C++ compiler. Meridian is regularly built with clang++ 3.3 and gcc 4.8.2. It will work with slightly older versions of those two.

• Boost. Meridian is currently built against Boost 1.54, but probably works with slightly older versions. Meridian prefers to use C++11/14 concepts in place of Boost ones (e.g., std::unique_ptr instead of boost::scoped_ptr).

Building

Meridian is built using the waf build tool, which is included in the repository. Simply run ./waf configure and then ./waf. For more advanced usage, see the waf documentation or ./waf --help.

Documentation

Meridian is documented using Doxygen. A Doxyfile is included in the root which can be used to produce the documentation in HTML format.